Many corporations and organizations disseminate information and advertising material through the mail. In order to minimize the costs associated with this type of mailing, the United States Postal Service (USPS) offers bulk mailing rates that result in decreased cost of mailing for each piece of mail. Certain types of preprocessing by bulk mailing organizations, such as presorting of bulk mail into lots by ZIP code, helps the USPS in mail sorting and leads to further discounts in the cost of mailing for bulk mailing organizations.
Of course, because of the large volume of bulk mail, the USPS would lose considerable revenue if bulk mailing organizations failed to comply strictly with their presorting obligations but still tried to take advantage of lower postal rates. It is also possible, through error, that a bulk mailer may apply insufficient metered postage to articles of mail. In addition, the USPS must have some form of quality control and verification to ensure that bulk mailers' presort efforts are accurate, so that improperly sorted bulk mail does not slow down the operation of USPS sorting activities.
Traditionally, this verification process is performed manually (with the exception of barcode verification). This manual verification process is very labor intensive and prone to error. Accordingly, a need arises for an automated verification system that is capable of processing large volumes of mail with speed and accuracy, and that maintains proper records relating to each bulk mailer for which verification operations are conducted.